Feb 25, 2011

As the weather turns

As the weather turns

The last couple of weeks in San Francisco were like the typical winter in San Francisco – coldish and wet. I’m still grateful for the sunny January and part of February we got to enjoy and fully appreciate the dryness of last weekend’s racing. However, I have to admit that I’ve been hitting the refresh button on weather.com more often than usual, always hoping that the forecast will take a turn for the better.

On Tuesday, prospects for tomorrow’s race were pretty grim – very cold and very wet. On Wednesday, I seriously considered pulling the plug on the race and emailing the promoters before the 5p.m. cutoff to transfer my registration to one of their upcoming races. But then, all the twitter comments started to flow my way and the bottom line in all of them, or rather the bottom line I drew from them was to HTFU. So I decided that I’m going to commit to racing at Snelling and do it in whatever weather may come – I’m still debating how smart that was, but then again, I’ve always considered myself a little more crazy than smart, and I’m plenty smart.

Throughout all of this, in the back of my mind were last week’s weather developments, where chances of rain on Saturday went down from 70 to 20 percent and my race was completely dry. And wouldn’t you know it, it looks like the same thing will hold true this week. However, that all depends on which weather reporting service you choose to believe.

One thing I learned living out here in California is that either meteorologists’ job here is much harder due to the Oceanic currents or something, or they really suck at their job. Back in Chicago, when you saw a 7-day forecast, 9 times out of 10 it was pretty damn accurate. Here, you can’t trust the forecast two days out – unless it’s summer and sunny pretty much every day (well, foggy, then sunny).

Another interesting wrinkle is that different weather services will report different forecasts. Like right now for example. My favorite, weather.com, shows 20 percent chance of rain and partially cloudy for tomorrow (you see why it’s my favorite, right?), while accuweather.com and wunderground.com are showing 50 percent chance of precipitation and possible snow showers. That’s quite a discrepancy. I would normally link to these sites with the relevant forecast, but it will probably change and be irrelevant by the time most of you click on them.

I don’t know what the weather will be like tomorrow morning, and it seems like I’m not alone. One thing is for sure, I’m bringing everything for every occasion, as my goal tomorrow (other than racing well, of course) is to be just a little less miserable out there than everyone else. I figure that little extra edge of being able to keep a smile on my face will help. I also heard somewhere that smiling takes less muscles than frowning, so it’s also about conserving energy.

Good luck to everyone racing Snelling tomorrow, let’s hope it won’t be an ice rink.